Death Toll in Ship Blast Rises to 17 / U.S. begins worldwide hunt for group responsible for Yemen attack

John F. Burns, New York Times

Published 4:00 am, Saturday, October 14, 2000

2000-10-14 04:00:00 PDT Aden, Yemen -- The presumed death toll from the blast that crippled the destroyer Cole rose to 17 yesterday after Navy divers spent the day searching the harbor bed for missing crew members and clues to the explosion's cause.

Ten sailors were still officially listed as missing, and 38 were known to have been wounded in Thursday's seaborne attack by suspected terrorists.

Navy officials said late yesterday that the blast blew a 40-by-40-foot hole in the Cole's port side, which is larger than first reported.

Witnesses said the vessel was attacked by two men in a small harbor boat that exploded as it drew alongside during the start of a refueling stop at this port on the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula.

While U.S. energies in Aden focused on the recovery effort, a worldwide hunt began in earnest to track down the group responsible for what had every appearance of a terrorist attack, though U.S. officials stopped short of publicly using the word terrorism.

There were reports of two Islamic groups claiming responsibility, but these could not be verified, and U.S. officials said their investigation had produced no firm leads so far.

Two senior defense officials said the United States had received an unspecific warning of a possible attack on a U.S. warship last month, but it lacked detail and did not mention a specific country where the attack was expected.

"It was a question of how directly you could tie it to a certain place," one said. Since the warning, reported by an intelligence source in the Arab world, was not specific enough, "it got put on the shelf." It was not clear that the warning could have stopped what some officials described yesterday as a sophisticated suicide bombing.

While the Cole's crew had extensive training in repelling an overt attack by a small boat and even had extra sailors on watch on Thursday, the blast had been so meticulously disguised and carried out that the officials said there was little the crew could have done to stop it.

While immediate suspicion fell on Islamic radical groups that have used Yemen as a base for terrorist attacks in the past, there was no concrete evidence to support this.

During the day, there were reports that two Islamic groups claimed to have attacked the Cole, but it was not immediately clear whether these were propaganda stunts by groups seeking publicity from deeds done by others.

MOHAMMED'S ARMY

In London, where he lives in self- exile, a Syrian-born Islamic radical, Sheikh Omar Bakri, was reported as saying that he had received a phone call from a group calling itself Mohammed's Army, which said it had attacked both the Cole and, early yesterday, the British Embassy in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital.

Later in the day, a previously unknown organization said in Beirut that it had carried out the attack.

Terrorism experts mulled various theories, among them the possibility that the ship was attacked in retaliation for events in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, where two weeks of confrontations between Israelis and Palestinians have produced a wave of anger across the Arab world directed at Israel, and to some extent for the United States, which is widely seen by Arabs as backing Israeli policies.

Others said it was also possible that the attack had nothing to do with the recent hostilities in the Middle East because it appeared to be a well-planned assault that would have required a substantial amount of time to plan.

During the day, fears of a wider terror campaign were stirred when an explosive device believed to have been a bomb was thrown over the wall at the British Embassy in Sanaa. The device, which exploded shortly after dawn atop a diesel generator in the embassy courtyard, damaged the building, but there were no casualties.

U.S. efforts in Aden yesterday concentrated on the search for the missing and on efforts at what a Navy spokesman described as "stabilizing" the crippled destroyer where it lay listing at its mooring point in a broad channel that leads into the inner harbor from the Gulf of Aden.

REPORTERS KEPT AWAY

Reporters were kept far away from the Cole, and they were even prevented by U.S. and Yemeni officials from photographing it. The huge hole on the vessel's port side -- visible until daybreak yesterday -- was covered by what appeared to be large white tarpaulins.

A Navy spokesman, Lt. Terrence Dudley, said the recovery effort had succeeded to the point where there was no danger of the Cole going to the bottom of Aden's deep-water harbor.

But Navy officials painted a grim picture of the situation aboard the disabled destroyer.

The blast flooded an area that extended the full width of the ship, officials said. Within that zone, some compartments are fully flooded and others partially flooded, with air pockets.

Decks and hatches have been crushed or bent out of shape, making movement through the area difficult in some places and impossible in others. The $1 billion destroyer was outfitted with some equipment that is helpful for this repair and rescue work, including hydraulic jacks, officials said.

But the ship is lacking other equipment, such as the "jaws of life" hydraulic tools used to remove trapped motorists from crushed motor vehicles. Because the blast detonated inward through the half-inch steel plate, authorities don't think any of the dead were washed out to sea.

Apart from the dead and wounded, who accounted for nearly a sixth of the 293-strong crew, the rest of the ship's complement remained aboard, many of them forced by blast damage below deck to bed for the night in sleeping bags under awnings stretched over the open decks.

U.S. PLANS TO TOW COLE HOME

Dudley said the tentative plan was to pump out the water from the damaged compartments, make some temporary repairs in Aden and then tow the Cole back to the United States for permanent repairs.

The developing U.S. investigation into the attack also focused yesterday on the Yemeni contractor hired to refuel American warships at Aden. U.S. officials declined to identify the contractor.

It was not clear what, if any, security procedures were in place to screen the contractor, and officials attributed responsibility variously to military commanders in the region, the Pentagon's logistics agency and the American Embassy in Sanaa. Officials declined to discuss the matter, saying it was being investigated.

Adm. Vern Clark, the chief of naval operations, said the Yemeni government had been notified of the visit 10 to 12 days ahead of time. A defense official said that by Wednesday, a day before the Cole arrived, it would have been widely expected in the port.

"If you want fresh fruit or vegetables you have to tell people when to be on the pier," the official, who is involved in security operations overseas, said. "If you want fuel, you have to tell people to be there at the facility."

Christopher Ronay, a former FBI explosives expert, said it was unlikely that the bombmakers had used the homemade chemistry of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil employed at the World Trade Center in New York in 1993 or at the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. That is because the dry chemicals used in such explosives absorb water -- a factor that might preclude their use around water.

He said the bomb's composition was more likely to have been several hundred pounds of high explosives like PETN or TNT, or a combination of such compounds, which have been found in terrorist bombs exploded in the Middle East dating back to the attacks on the U.S. Embassy and a military barracks in Beirut in the early 1980s.